The making and unmaking of sovereign territory: From colonial extraction to postcolonial conservation in Mozambique's Massingir region

This study investigates the territorial underpinnings of state making and unmaking in and through the villages of Massingir Velho and Canhane in Mozambique's Massingir region. I examine the practices and processes that have created, refashioned, and eroded national territory in different historical periods, focusing on how these configurations of territory continue to shape the region's contemporary political and physical landscape. More specifically, I examine the territorial transformations underlying and enabling colonial labor relations and Portuguese settlement in the mid-20th Century; post-independence socialist collectivization in the late-1970s; the deterritorialization and terror of the South African-backed Mozambican "civil war"; and finally post-war reconstruction, liberalization, and the creation of the Limpopo National Park, Mozambique's contribution to the tri-country Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Through reconstructing these events, I investigate how territory has been transformed to shape national subjects with particular orientations to national territory and to the state itself. Yet rather than viewing the Massingir region as a mere target of territorial intervention, I demonstrate how its residents have often demanded and embraced certain territorial-based state-led development projects. I illustrate, moreover, how residents have defied such projects, often making national territory into something other than what the state had intended. Next, I challenge the conception of states and territories as discrete containers and the assumption held by many globalization theorists that state sovereignty and "territorial integrity" are threatened by their "outside." I illustrate, on the contrary, how transnational and extra-territorial relations and partnerships—as uneven as they may be—are central to how states consolidate their control over national territory and populations. Finally, I investigate what we might learn from this study about the relation between past and present and between time and space. Taking into account the many different pasts that have woven together to reshape the Massingir region and that reemerge in its present complex topography, I show that space contains generative qualities and capacities that enter into the movement of history and shape its course. I hence illustrate that space is not simply the backdrop or effect of historical change but constitutive of it.